Photonic On-Chip THz Antenna Arrays for 6G Wireless Communication

The migration of 4G to 5G cellular communication forced researchers to explore different techniques. One of them was looking towards mm-wave frequencies in search for more bandwidth. Looking forward to the needs for the next generation, 6G, even higher data-rates will be required and higher spectral bandwidth is needed to support this. This can be found around 140 GHz. However, at these frequencies, communication become even more challenging, requiring very large antenna arrays to concentrate radiated energy in the users direction to overcome the high path losses. This project will explore how novel assembly techniques can help to bring photonics, electronics and antennas closer together to build low cost but highly efficient large scale antenna arrays. The core will be a photonic beamforming chip, which will provide the signal processing to drive all antennas in the array. On top of this chip, tiny amplifiers will be assembled using micro transfer printing, allowing very close, low loss integration. Finally, these amplifiers will be interconnected towards antennas that are integrated on the back of the photonic IC completing a highly integrated antenna array. Following this approach, integration densities of 100 antennas / cm² are foreseen